This Week on Microstock: Alamy’s New Blog, 2014 EyeEm Awards Finalists, Hyperlapse, Vector Drawing Apps for iPad and more

Alamy’s New Blog

Exciting news for Alamy contributors and customers! In addition to the 50 million images milestone (below) this week, there’s also a new blog – a job well done to the designers. The blog is filled with new posts and great contents that will surely encourage buyers and increase the traffic in the site. What are you waiting for? Check out the new Alamy Blog now!

Alamy Reaches 50 Million Images

Alamy is adding to the list of recent milestones stock agencies has been hitting these past few months. Last Wednesday, August 27, the independent stock photo agency announced that its collection has already reached 50 million images, continuing to be the world’s largest imagery source online. According to Henrik Lehnerer’s post about this milestone, Alamy adds 30,000 new images everyday and is predicted to grow to 100 million images in the next three years. It now represents over 600 agencies including National Geographic, Image Source, Blend, Hero Images and a lot more. Rachel Wakefield, head of sales, said: “Our growing collection delivers a great competitive advantage, with lots of great new content being added all the time our collection continues to offer the depth and breadth our customers are looking for. This year we started our own mobile collection Stockimo, which already has 75,000 images and is meeting the growing trend for fresh, ‘of the moment’ photography.” Alamy currently has 130,000 registered contributors and has paid out $145 million so far.

The 2014 EyeEm Awards Finalists

Among the hundreds of thousands of images submitted from all over the world to The 2014 EyeEm Awards, EyeEm has finally revealed the top 100 finalists. The images were carefully selected by 21 judges, ranging from world renowned photographers to directors, architects and curators. The top 100 images will be printed and will be part of the around the world exhibit of The 2014 EyeEm Awards Exhibition. The winners of the 2014 EyeEm Awards will be announced on September 12 at The 2014 EyeAm Festival in Berlin. Visit this link to see the top 100 images submitted to the EyeEm Awards.

Instagram Unveils Hyperlapse

Instagram, the most popular photo app among mobile phone users, released last week another standalone app this week called Hyperlapse, an app that makes it easier for users to create professional looking time-lapse videos. What was only possible with a Steadicam or an expensive video setup is now possible on your iPhone or iPad for free. One of Hyperlapse’s engineers, Alex Karpenko, shared on Wired how the team successfully created a timelapse that is possible with a smartphone. Karpenko developed an image stabilization technology called Cinema, which makes use of the phone’s built-in gyroscope to measure camera movement. Karpenko then applied an algorithm to reduce shake and create fluidity – something he developed as part of his thesis at Stanford University.

For now, Hyperlapse is only available to iPhone and iPad, but Instagram hopes to develop an Android version soon, but they still need to work on the gyroscope APIs on Android phones. If you want to know more how Alex Karpenko and his team made Hyperlapse possible, visit this article on Wired. However, if you’re excited to see how amazing Hyperlapse can be, here’s an actual video.

Top 5 Vector Drawing Apps for iPad

If you’re a designer, oftentimes, your mind is busy forming up ideas for the next designs you would make and sometimes, good ideas suddenly pops out of nowhere that you regret not being at your desktop. Now, you don’t have to worry because there’s these top 5 Vector Drawing Apps for your iPad and iPhone so you can start working on your designs right away.

iDraw – This is a pure Vector Graphic application which features a wide range of tools and a friendly UI.

iDesign – iDesign has an advance Boolean editing abilities such as unite, subtract, intersect and exclude.

Freeform – In this app you can create the most basic shapes, group objects and apply basic transformations to them.

Inkpad – This app lets you create layers which make your vectors easier to edit and it can also perform Boolean operation.

neu.Draw – Don’t be fooled with its clean interface because it just has the essential functionalities that you need to create a great artwork.

No Image is Safe: Bing Image Widget. Microsoft’s Bing has created the Bing Image Widget making It possible for any Bing user to embed, free of charge, on their website or blog any images found in a Bing Images search.

Stock Photo Safety Card for Designers. Stockphotosecrets has recently published an infographic that would help designers stay out of trouble. Plus! An added short stock photo safety video for you to watch.

About Author

I write about the stock photo and microstock industry since 2006 on my several online-magazines. My goal for MyStockPhoto is to teach photographers and stock photographers how to sell more photos and earn money with their photography hobby.